


The Green Knight

by TheoMiller



Category: Knight & Rogue - Hilari Bell
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Necromancy, Slow Build, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2543348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Divergent from The Last Knight - Ceciel's potions give Michael the ability to reanimate corpses, and Fisk doesn't receive the letter from his family. </p><p>Michael is suitably horrified by his powers. Fisk is suitably fascinated. Michael's quest for good deeds and adventure collides with Fisk's quest to keep Michael safe from both the law and Michael's own creeping doubts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1: Michael

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!
> 
> I've got 5 chapters done, almost six, and I'm going to try to update every day, but it is NaNo time, so we'll see how well that works out.

“Listen, fellas, it was a harmless bet—”

The voice of my only friend and faithful squire pulled me out of my reverie – my squire would call it a sulk – and I turned my attention to the scene playing out in the lot beyond the inn.

“You beat me out of eighty bucks!” A man snarled, as he loomed over Fisk. Apparently his ability to find decent marks when he did his ‘mathematical sharping’ had failed him. Or maybe he’d just found someone who was a very aggressive drunk.

“Yeah, and then I bought you a round,” Fisk wheedled. “Look, I won it fair and square, all right.”

I left the bench by the door and made my way over to what was almost certainly shaping up to be a bar brawl. It was awful, but I knew that a fight would help me get my mind off my own problems, even if it was temporary. I hadn’t had a decent bit of fisticuffs in ages.

“Give it back,” the aggressor said.

Fisk (who was quite good at seeming harmless and looked more like an clerk or a steward than any sort of swindler) held up his hands. “I told you, I—”

“Good sir,” I interrupted. And then I stepped just close enough to see the glint of metal in the stranger’s hand, and the hair on the back of my head rose. It seemed I was not dealing with a good sir. “Ah,” I said, shooting an apologetic look at Fisk. He looked frightened, but not panicked, which I took as a good sign.

Before any of us could move, three more men poured out of the bar. “Hey, Dave, got a problem?”

“Just this rogue and his bodyguard,” said Dave.

I frowned and moved between Fisk and the four men, eyeing the knife Dave held with deep mistrust. “I don’t think it wise to—”

“You think I give a damn what you think is ‘wise’, bud?”

“No,” I admitted. “But as the only sober one here, I think we can all agree that my judgment is the least impaired and therefore inherently more trustworthy.”

Dave glared. “You callin’ me dumb?”

“No, sir, just saying that we all do foolish things after a night of drinking, and perhaps ‘tis best if you—no,” I had to seize his wrist to keep him from shoving past me with the knife, and I knew the minute I made contact with him that I was in over my head, because his friends were lurching forward too.

And then my skin prickled, and everyone froze, staring off over my shoulder. I let my eyes slide closed so I wouldn’t have to see whatever fresh hell I’d conjured up this time. Fisk made a strange noise, one I couldn’t quite pinpoint, and his attackers fled, muttering _witch_ under their breath. I took another deep breath, and then another, and then my throat felt like it was closing up, and warm hands gripped my shoulders.

“Hey, hey, Michael, calm down, you didn’t even—you didn’t even look. _You_ did that.”

I managed to shove him away in time to stumble a few steps from him before I was sick all over the grass. When my stomach stopped heaving, I risked a glance towards where he was still staring, where a skeleton barely held together by sinew and a few bits of remaining flesh was dragging itself across the ground. I needed… I needed to assure him that that was impossible, that I wasn’t responsible for the corpse rising from the dead.

“Well,” Fisk was saying. “That was pretty handy.”

My insincere lies tangled up in my throat, and I stared uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then, “What?”

“Sentient magic,” he said, combing his fingers through springy dark curls. “Huh. I suppose… But never mind that, we really should clear out before they get pitchforks.”

“I…” I didn’t know how to respond, and Fisk made a strange face at my prolonged silence.

He flicked an assessing gaze over me. Then, “Let’s get the horses, if we don’t leave soon, those idiots might catch up.”

“Oh, the drunks frighten you, but not the reanimated corpse?” I said, even as I took a steadying breath and went to examine the latest ill-fated set of remains.

“Not when you’re the one controlling them. What are you doing?”

“I can’t leave them here,” I said. “I can’t just leave them. They deserve better than to be dragged from their rest.”

“Making a bunch of bones dance doesn’t mean the dead are awake, it just means you have very specific animation abilities. You bury them to bring yourself comfort, not them. That’s why we have funerals. For the living. The dead are dead, so what do they care?”

I stared at him, and his gaze flickered over my face. Then, “You should probably saddle up the horses. I’ll gather the bones,” he said.

“You’re an excellent squire,” I told him.

“I know.”


	2. Chapter 2: Fisk

“We should probably talk about this,” I pointed out.

Michael’s lips flattened, but he just shook his head sharply and urged Chant a little faster onward.

If his magic was uniformly triggered accidentally by extreme emotion, he really ought to figure out how to control them. His emotions first, and then his powers.

My hands were still shaking with fear from the fight, and then the appearance of the corpse. I took the time to steady them. Jack used to say it’s hard to be smart when you’re scared. And Jack is usually right about these things.

“That bitch’s potions worked,” I led with. “And you’re frightened by these powers. That’s understandable. But if you don’t find a way to control them, you’re going to have problems, problems we can’t effectively deal with now that you’re going to be unredeemed. You need to learn to control them.”

“ _Control them_?” Michael demanded.

I sighed. Trust the idiot to be less comfortable with magica than the giftless townsman. “Yes, Mike, control them. Unless you want to risk an army of the dead appearing whenever you’re scared.” Which might be handy, when his status as unredeemed made him a target.

“I don’t want to talk about this,” he said quietly.

The awkward silence carried us past Deepbend, which afforded us the opportunity to stop and file my redeemed status. And flaunt it past that accursed judicar who’d nearly had me flogged for a bloodless crime. Michael was laughing, the first time in over a week, when we left the sheriff’s office.

“You enjoyed that far too much.”

“Oh, you’re enjoying it too, you officially reformed a rogue into a squire. It’s on paper, even.”

“You really are an excellent squire,” said Michael. “Though I’m not certain how much of a knight I’ll be, considering.”

I sighed and reached out to grab his hand, pulling him away from where we’d stabled the horses and towards where there was a little bookshop tucked in between a chandler’s and a basket weaver’s. “I need to show you something. Come on, I’m sure he’ll have a copy of it somewhere.”

“Master Fisk!” Todd Carrington said, surprised, when I dragged Michael into the shop. “I thought you’d… ah, I see you’ve brought your nobleman along. What can I do for you, Master Fisk?”

My lips twitched as I started scanning the shelves. “Don’t worry, Todd, you’re too poor for me to bother conning. This is Michael, he’s my very favorite lunatic. We’re in the midst of an argument, actually, that can only be settled by a copy of _Codex Umbrarum_. Do you have any?”

“I have several. My own sister translated them, she’s really quite clever, a trait that appears to have skipped me over. Ah! Here,” he said, and handed us a linen-bound tome.

I opened it, about to request an original copy, without the translation, only to pause when I saw the page it had fallen open to. “This _is_ clever,” I said. The left-hand page, the back of one sheet, was the original text transcribed into more modern letters. On the right were a literal translation and carefully notated footnotes explaining it.

“Do you want to tell me what this is about now?” Michael hissed at me.

There was a table of contents and page numbers in the upper right hand corner of each page, so I could flip through easily. “Todd, I could _kiss_ your sister.”

“Well, she’s at the university in Fallon, if you want to take that for action. She’s unmarried,” said Todd, unconcerned. “I’ve got to meet the salesman. Don’t let this rogue leave my wares untended,” he added to Michael, as he got his cloak.

Michael wished him a warm journey, since it was cold for autumn, but I was too busy flipping through the _Codex_ to echo the sentiment. “ _Now_ will you tell me? Fisk. Fisk! Fisk, I will pinch you, don’t…” He fell silent, leaning over my shoulder as I smoothed out the pages.

“’Necromancy’,” I read. “’There have been reports of Savants speaking to the dead since there have been reports of Savants, and this passage makes references to no less than nineteen different accounts of necromancy from other writers. The writer presumes that the reader believes the following as fact…’ And then it goes on to list commonly held beliefs of the time, here.”

“So?” Michael said sullenly.

I flipped a few pages until I found what I was looking for—a reference to an older version of a ballad that Michael must’ve read. “This, _viridis_ , it’s usually translated as ‘the young’, in the sense that _young people_ often seek out help from the spirits of the dead. Some even think it refers to orphans. But Viridis is a common epithet for—”

“—the Green Knight,” said Michael.

“Yes, exactly, a semi-mythical figure whose real name was lost to the ages,” I said. “The few historical accounts of him suggest that he is remarkable for being the youngest knight in the realms, but there was a common mistranslation. Instead of Sir Who-so-ever the Youthful, it got read as Sir Who-so-ever the Green. The Green Knight. He’s often associated with the Green God, mainly because of the translation error, but there were some theories… yes, yes! Todd’s sister must have read Littleworth’s _Chevalier_.”

“‘NB: _Chevalier_ , the ballad cycle responsible for the first translation of _viridis_ as ‘green’ is predated by Mueller using the epithet _augur_ for the Green Knight, the basis of the idea that the Green Knight served the gods’,” Michael read. A crease was forming on his brow. “So… so the Green Knight was a Savant? Why is this in this chapter?”

“Because _augur_ doesn’t mean Savant, Michael, it means seer. Someone who reads the truth in entrails, actually. They used to—never mind that, the point is, this has mostly been dismissed as superstition, everyone always likes to believe their heroes are more than just human, but if sentient magic _is_ possible, and it must be, then the oldest accounts of the man who likely inspired you to be a knight errant maintain that he had a connection with the dead not unlike yours.”

Michael stared at the page with an unreadable expression. Then, “None of this chapter mentions bringing corpses back to life, does it?”

“No, that would be dismissed as farfetched,” I said, and it startled a laugh out of him.


	3. Chapter 2: Michael

Fisk’s scholarly diatribe had reassured most of my fears about my ill-gotten powers, namely that they would force me down a path of villainy, but nothing could ease either of our nerves as we grew closer to my father’s estate. I would be declared unredeemed, and my wrists tattooed, and… And this was what I’d chosen. I could be a knight errant, unredeemed or no. Mayhap ‘twould even make me a better man.

But none of that made us feel much better about facing my father again.

I knew that Fisk was clinging to the hope that my father would find a loophole to get me out of it, but ‘twas impossible, given the public pronouncement in old high speech. And even if he hadn’t given the terms for my redemption in such certain terms, he would not let me go. I knew that. ‘Twas up to Fisk to come to terms with it now.

“Michael,” my father said. “Thou wast sent to redeem thyself by returning the murderess, Ceciel Mallory, to justice. Hast thou done so?”

“No, I haven’t. She was…” I could not truthfully proclaim her innocence, but I also could not claim redress for those crimes she committed against me. “She did not kill her husband, nor any other, though she has done things which I believe ought to be reported to her liege and the High Liege. I would like to speak to the judicars about them later.”

My father looked at me desperately, and then swallowed before saying, “Then I have no choice but to pronounce thee an unredeemed man—cast off from thy kin, honorless in the eyes of thy fellows, rightless in the eyes of the law. If any—”

“But you haven’t heard the full story!” Fisk protested, sounding outraged on my behalf.

“Fisk,” I said. “Don’t.”

“What, then, is the full story?” inquired one of the judicars.

Fisk had gained the attention of the crowd. “Do you want me to start with Lord Dorian, who’s just here to squeeze a few more roundels out of the people he’s meant to be helping?”

I closed my eyes; there’s no stopping Fisk when he gets worked up like this.

“He’s willing to hang a woman for a murder she didn’t commit – though I think she should be hanged, for experimenting on the unwilling – because of a decades old disagreement. And Sir Michael,” my eyes flew open, “he’s a good man, he’s risking everything to save the life of an innocent woman, he’s better than any of these judicars, but he’s to be unredeemed for the rest of his life because his father wants to control him.”

Murmurs broke out in the crowd, and my father—and Lord Dorian, oh Gods, _Fisk_ , _no_ —glowered.

“Who is this rogue?”

“I’m…”

I knew, a moment before Fisk spoke, what he was going to say. The sentiment warmed my heart, even as the knowledge of what would happen to Fisk the moment he wasn’t safe in a crowd chilled me to the core.

“I’m Sir Michael’s squire. And he’s a knight errant.”

-

“So,” Fisk said, when I returned from explaining the true nature of Ceciel Mallory to the judicars, “back where we started.”

“Except I can’t get you off of these charges. And no-one’s coming to bail us out. What were you _thinking_ , Fisk?”

Fisk was examining the lock on the manacles. “I was thinking that was the largest public forum we’d ever get, and that your ridiculous moral code _could_ make you into a folk hero. And don’t worry about me. After you’re tattooed, go to Todd Carrington. He’ll pay my debt, he’s always complaining he needs a young man to shift books for him.”

“You publicly insulted my father and his liege lord, in their fief.”

“I take it back,” he said, “worry about me. Worry about me very, very much. I’m turning into you.”

“How do you know Carrington?”

“He’ll explain,” my squire said, studying his hands now.

“But I want to hear it from you,” I said. “I want… besides, neither of us are getting any sleep tonight.”

Fisk slumped back against the stone wall of the cell. “He sold books to my father.”

“Your father was the scholar, then.”

His eyes blazed with something that was close to hatred. “He wanted to be a scholar. Enough that he spent every fract we had on books, and then willed them to the university at Fallon when he died. He had a falling-out with Todd years before when Todd’s half-sister – who’s nearly twenty years younger than him, mind you – got accepted to the university. And my father… didn’t.”

“He willed all of his books to the university?”

“He was barely cold in the ground before they were being boxed up and shipped off to Fallon. We moved to the Old Town, because we couldn’t pay the door tax.”

I wasn’t shackled to the wall, since I was ostensibly more trustworthy than Fisk, so I half-stood and then froze, realizing he might not appreciate contact. “How much were the books worth?”

“Six thousand, seven hundred gold roundels.”

“I thought… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. I always thought it was stupid, saying sorry for things that happened to other people.” But his face was closed off, evidently having decided he’d said enough – more than enough.

“Ceciel always used that funnel. I wouldn’t let her—it was awful. And I thought you weren’t coming, because I didn’t have enough faith in you, so I thought… I was so frightened, all of the time, and I was _miserable_ , and all I could think was that I needed someone to talk to, before I went mad, and then the bugs started coming to life.”

“Bugs?” Fisk said. “You can animate more than humans?”

I had a feeling he was taking notes inside his head. But I owed him this. “Yes. I… The simple ones, the ones she buried, they kept digging their way out. I could feel them, had to order them to stop so Ceciel wouldn’t find out. And then, when you showed up, and we were smashing the potions, I could see it. The magica. I can see magica, Fisk, not just sense it.”

“What does it look like?” he asked, voice calm and level, but I could see the curiosity he was struggling to hide.

“It glows. And so do the bodies I bring back.”


	4. Chapter 4: Fisk

If Michael had known this long that he had abilities, that meant he’d lied to Lady Ceciel. And well enough that I hadn’t known, although my knowledge that he doesn’t lie had made me not think too closely on it.

“I knew she was a clever bitch,” I commented. “I just hadn’t realized how… oh, look, company.”

“Fisk,” the leader of the man-at-arms said dully. “You’re to come with us.”

I went still. There was no way anyone wanted to talk to me this late at night, not unless it was something nefarious. And I’d had enough of nefarious. Especially from any man who served Lord Dorian. If I’d pissed him off enough, it was possible that he’d have me killed. “Why?” I asked with more bravado than I felt.

“Someone paid your debt. You’re free to go.”

I spun around to look at Michael, who clearly had no more idea than me who could’ve paid my debt.

“Come on. She’s waiting.”

“ _She?_ ” I mouthed at Michael. He shrugged helplessly.

I was led out rather firmly by the arm, out into the cold night air where a cloaked figure was standing. When I got close enough, I could see the glint of spectacles. And I only knew one rich woman with spectacles, at least only one who’d spend as much as a fract on me. “Lady Kathryn.”

“Shh,” she said. “Keep your voice down. What’s it like in there, do you think we could…?”

“Break him out? No, it’s nearly impregnable. Nearly is nearly, of course, but this is Michael. We could tear the entire jail down and he wouldn’t leave with us.”

“Why is he doing this?”

“To save Lady Ceciel, and to avoid becoming Rupert’s steward.”

She sighed, and her breath formed a cloud. “Then what do we do?”

“ _You_ go back to Seven Oaks. _I_ ’ll take care of Michael after—well, after.”

“Where will you go?” she asked, and I could hear that she was trying not to cry and wondered if I should hug her.

But she did bring up an excellent point. Where _would_ we go? I needed to plan. We’d have to make money somehow, and no-one would hire an unredeemed man. And even if I managed to keep us afloat, no-one would give us lodgings, and winter was fast approaching.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Well, figure it out soon. Father hasn’t officially pronounced him unredeemed yet, you interrupted that. What were you trying to do?”

“Trying to get public support in his favor,” I said, and then had to pause to yawn. “It almost certainly won’t work. Have you tried talking to your father?”

“We all have. Mother, Rupert, Rosamund even cried at him.”

I sighed. “So there’s nothing we can do.”

“Well, there’ll be a delay, so maybe you can convince him to run?” she suggested.

“Delay?” I said. “What delay?”

-

“Oh,” I said. The grove of blood oaks – some so big they had to date back hundreds of years – was all torn up. Dirt and grass had been churned up at the foot of every tree, and a few were broken up by the dull glow of bone in lantern light. Or, in the case of some of the saplings, half-rotted corpses. Gross.

Kathy had her hood down, so I could see the incredulous look she leveled me. “ _Oh_? That’s all you have to say? The dead are rising, and all you can say is _oh_?”

 _Shit_. “I’m just having trouble processing. Uh, when did this happen?”

“Well, most everyone was at… at Michael’s pronouncement, we don’t get much gossip, and when the groundskeepers got back, they found them.”

Which means they didn’t have much time to rise, probably because a certain idiot knight didn’t summon them when he was facing an unredeemed life, instead waiting until when I was in danger. Oh, Michael.

But this was making something clearer, for all that it obscured what I knew about Michael’s powers (if they were triggered by protective instinct, why did they work on bugs when Michael was all alone?): the key to Michael’s lunacy was that he cared more for others than he did for himself.

“It’s close to daylight, Lady Kathryn. You should go home. Don’t worry about Michael. I can’t stop him from being unredeemed," which was technically true, though I still had some vague hopes of averting that, "but I can keep it from damaging him too much. Michael never thinks about his own problems when he can solve someone else’s instead.”

“You’re going to let him become unredeemed?” she demanded. She looked at me like I was insane, which I clearly was, but I was too busy planning to explain myself.

Besides, it made sense, at least in the twisted world where Michael resided. How did you make a miserable knight less miserable? You gave him a quest.


	5. Chapter 5: Michael

Fisk was acting oddly when he returned to the jail the next morning, and he brushed off most of my attempts to figure out why. But he did tell me who’d paid his debt. “Is she angry with me?” I asked.

“More so with your father. Although she was rather annoyed when I made her go home. Hopefully no-one who saw her sneak out told your father. I think most of the household is on her side, though.”

“Did she mention Rosamund?” I asked, though I knew ‘twas foolish. Rosamund was my father’s ward, my cousin, and a rich, beautiful, Gifted young woman who would never marry an unredeemed fourth son. But I loved her, so I could hardly help myself.

“She says Rosamund cried for you,” he told me. “But there was a disturbance in some grove, so the pronouncement and the tattooing will be delayed a few days. I brought you a book.”

He truly is an excellent squire. “ _Chevalier_ ,” I said. “Did it pain you greatly to spend money on such a thing?” I teased.

“What makes you think I paid for it?”

“Because you wouldn’t risk another run-in with the law for _Chevalier_.”

He looked more relieved than amused. “Listen, Michael, I’m trying to make a bit of money so we have savings piled up, so I can’t really stay.”

“Very well,” I said. “Can you bring me another book tomorrow? It won’t take me long to read _Chevalier_. Littleworth’s flow makes for an easy read.”

“What book do you want?” he asked.

I paused. “Bring me one you think I’ll like.”

“So, the most awful, blindingly sentimental ballad cycle I can find,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, chest tightening at the look on his face, like he was frightened but didn’t want to tell me. “Fisk. Thank you.”

“What else is a squire for, Noble Sir?”

-

He brought me a ballad cycle the next day. The copy was so old and worn that the name had been rubbed off of the binding, and the seams were thin and becoming ragged. He shuffled his feet and told me that ‘twas the only copy he could find, from a secondhand book peddler. “I liked it when I was eight, so it’s probably at about the right maturity for you,” he said.

“Hilarious.” But I was already reading…

I could see why Fisk had liked this as a child. The main character was intelligent and often sarcastic (like Fisk), loved to read (like Fisk), and had a father who put his interests before the family’s wellbeing (also like Fisk). But the main character, Julia, was a woman—the daughter of a wealthy merchant, she was about to be married off to an older man with control of a port her father wanted to use.

Fisk hates clichés, so I was surprised when it went exactly how I expected: she insisted she wanted to marry for love, and when her father refused, she ran away.

Her true love turned out to be a blacksmith, who helped her disguise herself as an apprentice so she could live and work with him until the search for her died down. I snickered, fully intending to tease Fisk for his poor taste in childhood, as the book turned to Act II of the poem, and the girl’s true love got suddenly, brutally murdered.

I half-expected it to turn out that he was a villain, or perhaps had faked his death, but even those vague hopes were dashed as she went on to take her dead lover’s place as the smith, and I was starting to wonder if this truly was the best choice for me to be reading while sitting alone in a jail cell.

Then a carriage accident in a storm led to the stranding of a beautiful young woman with the main character, now widely believed by the townsmen to be male, and hilarity ensued. The young woman immediately fell in love with “Julian”, and Julia had to spur the woman’s advances to protect her secret, all while helping the woman – Sera – avoid marrying the man she was sent to marry – who turned out to be the same man Julia had been betrothed to.

I was laughing, clutching my sides, when I was once again confronted with a sharp twist in the story: Julia told Sera her secret, as I’d expected, and then they went to bed together anyway. _Err_.

“It’s based on a true story,” Fisk said, and I jumped. He snickered. “Let me guess, Sera just found out Julian’s secret?”

I could feel the heat blooming on my cheeks. “Yes. How did you get in here so cursed quietly?”

“I just walked in, Mike. You were just, ah, occupied.”

“You read this as a _child_?” I said.

He scoffed. “I read worse, and younger. So, what do you think?”

“I… wait, true story?”

“Julia of Abene. She was arrested no less that seventeen times for dueling. In fact, she… no, you’ll get to that part.”

I smiled reassuringly while he cast a worried gaze over me. “’Twill not kill me to spend a few days in jail, Fisk.”

“You do all sorts of things that should be perfectly safe and yet get us into a world of trouble. Rescue damsels, for instance.”

“Ah, but would you have it any other way?” I asked.

“No,” said Fisk, in a strange voice. “No, I wouldn’t.”


	6. Chapter 6: Fisk

After a day spent talking about Michael’s adventures in every tavern, to everyone who would listen, I had been expecting that some time spent with Michael and the favorite book of my childhood would be relaxing. Instead, all I could think about was the future.

How would I take care of an unredeemed man? I hadn’t managed to take care of my sisters, and they were able to work and claim redress from the law. We had nowhere to go, and wherever we did go, we’d probably be driven off the moment someone realized he was unredeemed.

My mother had been miserable, thinking herself a burden on us, in her last days. What would Michael, who needed to help people like most of us need air, do when doubt crept along and reminded him that I might’ve been better off as a criminal?

I could still run away and be a criminal again. Or a clerk, or anything else. I didn’t need to be this lunatic’s keeper. Jack always said that getting attached was a bad idea, especially with partners.

“I don’t want to be like Jack,” I murmured, and Tipple flicked her ears.

Michael was making me soft. But… but without me, I wasn’t sure how well Michael could learn to control his emotions or, by extension, his powers. And as much as I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life sleeping outside in rain or snow or sweltering heat, I also didn’t want to live in a world where the dead randomly came to life. _What if someone controlled Michael_? Yes, it was better all around if I stayed with Michael.

And if I tried really, really hard, I could almost believe that those were the real reasons I was staying.

-

“Master Fisk!” The book peddler who’d sold me the copy of _Armigera_ I’d given Michael called.

I paused, then approached him cautiously. “Yes?”

“I was talking to Todd Carrington and—are you the same Fisk who’s, ah, squire to Sir Michael?”

“I am,” I said. Sometimes I really wonder about my sanity. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I was showing him my wares, and he commented on the Armigera cycle being gone, and I told him some lad calling himself squire to a knight errant had bought it, and he was real interested, of course, you don’t see very many knights, which is to say any,” I cleared my throat and he said hastily, “And anyway, then I mentioned your name, and, well, Carrington wants your help. He says he has a quest for you.”

“ _Todd_ asked for help? He actually asked for someone to help him? He didn’t sigh and comment how he wishes some young squirely lad would come help him? He asked for my help?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” the peddler said, looking at me with a faintly alarmed expression.

I gave him a tin roundel for his troubles, and then went back to Seven Oaks. I hadn’t told Michael, but I’d taken to staying there, because Rupert himself had ventured out into town to extend an invitation. Baron Seven Oaks glared at me most of the time, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge my existence during the awkward family dinners where Kathy perfected a resentful air and Rosamund turned out to be pretty even when she sulked.

“We need to talk,” Kathy greeted me when I slipped into the library.

I jumped and spun around. “What?” I said, too sharply.

“You’re allowed to be in the library,” she told me. “What’s wrong?”

I was sneaking in to see if I could find another old text that had mentioned necromancy. But I wasn’t about to tell Kathy that, so I just shrugged. “You startled me. Why do we need to talk?”

“Somebody in the next fief over reported a dead body rising. They were drunk, and it was gone the next morning, so the sheriff laughed them out of his office, but given recent events, he gathered the witnesses. Turns out two of the witnesses skipped town, they were so spooked. One was named Fisk. And the stable hand for the inn said they had a big grey horse and a little spotted horse.”

“Errr,” I managed.

“You’re investigating this!”

“No, I’m trying to avoid investigating this,” I said.

“You—why?” Kathy frowned at me. “Doesn’t this seem like exactly the sort of think Michael would be interested in? He must’ve seen that body, I’m surprised he isn’t sitting in jail trying to – Fisk?”

I had grabbed her arm and dragged her over into a corner of the library where the sound wouldn’t carry. It was colder there, but that wasn’t why I shivered. “I need you to promise that you won’t tell anyone,” I said.

“Why?” she demanded stubbornly.

“Because it’s about Michael. He didn’t want me to know.” And I was betraying his trust by telling her, wasn’t I? Does it count, when he hadn’t sworn me to secrecy? And surely fair was fair – he kept it from me, which meant I was allowed to tell Kathy. Or something. “He could be hurt, killed even, if anyone found out. He might even let them kill him, were he confronted on it.”

Kathy frowned. “What secret could be so terrible as that?”

I told her.

“Sentient magic is impossible!”

“Tell that to the bodies dragging themselves out of the ground wherever Michael goes,” I said.

“But—but—Michael isn’t simple.”

“No. He’s got magic, though, and I’m not sure it’ll go away. It’s been months since Ceciel—well, since Ceciel. Surely normal potions would’ve worked their way out of his system.”

“Because you’re an expert on potions,” said Kathy, but despite her sharp tone, she looked halfway to believing me.

“We need to get Michael out of jail as soon as possible, Kathy. Whether you believe me or not.”

And the only way to get Michael out of jail was to have him marked unredeemed and sent on his way. All the tiny loopholes I could’ve used, to try and get him to go free, they were useless if he was going to be strung up for witchcraft. She knew it, I knew it, the only thing to do was get it over with _faster_. And by “it”, I meant the legal process that would destroy any chance Michael had at a normal life, necromancy aside.

Sometimes I hate being a pragmatist.


End file.
